


energy dripping off her fists

by supinetothestars



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Carol’s a dumbass and I love her, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 10:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20776871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supinetothestars/pseuds/supinetothestars
Summary: Carol visits some old friends and tries to solve a problem.(AU where endgame and infinity war never happened. MCU timeline borrowing plots from 616.)





	energy dripping off her fists

When Carol first got the message from Torfa, she thought there was another scuffle with the haffenseye for her to break up. It had only been a few months ago, after all, that she’d been called out to help Tic’s crew out of a disagreement with some Haffenseye slavers and ended up spending a weekend on the sandy dunes of Torfa, helping Jackie and Gil tug around old spaceships and fixing up the old Nyx fighter that would become the  _ Warbird _ . Her first time setting foot on Torfa had been under the directions of the Kree, of course. She and the rest of the Starforce had gone in to find a skrull spy that had taken the place of a kree contact. That had been her last mission under Kree rule, and also the first time she’d met Talos. It was about fourteen years later that she’d first helped out the refugee colonies on Torfa, and the refugees there remained some of her closest friends.

Carol still remembered her first meeting with Gil and Jackie. She’d shown up full of confidence, having heard from Tic that the refugee colony was in crisis. The weeks before that had been spent on a long and fruitless search for a weakness within kree battle lines, and she’d been almost encouraged to hear of a crisis like that Torfa was under: it was something simple. Solvable. She’d walk in, find the problem, and punch it. It would go away, and with it, the creeping feeling of helplessness that came with fighting a war that could never be won.

Things went off plan almost immediately. Carol’s first impression of the great expanse of Torfan sand was acquired primarily through taste, as Gil punched her backwards so hard she skidded several feet across the dirt and got a mouthful of grit.  _ Put it away, Carol,  _ she thought to herself as she crouched on the dirt, flexing her hand in an attempt to make the golden glow fade.  _ You don’t bring a photon blast to a fistfight.  _

As it turned out, holding back in that fight was one of the best decisions she’d ever made. Within a week, she, Jackie, Gil and Tic had become lifelong friends, and the persistent illness plaguing the refugees had been linked to illegal Vibranium mining at the hands of the Spartax. Carol had gone up against a fleet of Spartax crew, given a long-winded and impromptu speech about her time as a warrior, and punched the Vibranium mines into a cloud of ash and dust on the horizon of a sickness-free Torfan refugee colony. It had been simple; one of her better adventures. The type she could reminisce about at parties and the type where she didn’t feel like finding the nearest bottle of gin every time she remembered it. 

So when she’d gotten the call to Torfa in the late summer of 2019, she felt confident. Sure of herself, sure of the solvability of the problem at hand. She’d grabbed the cat, kissed the fiancée goodbye, and sped the Warbird into the great grand stars in yet another field trip from her day job as an Avenger. 

Carol noticed right away that things looked different on Torfa. When she visited a few months before, the colony had an array of buildings and ships that was impressive given the settlement’s youth. The buildings were still there, but they were looking dilapidated, with the shingles falling off shacks. Someone’s pet the run was padding about nipping at children’s heels. Carol wondered if there’d been a particularly bad sandstorm recently, or if the haffenseye had resumed their tradition of raiding for supplies. 

Carol intended to search for Jackie in the defense building, where she could usually be found scheduling shipments of supplies or overseeing junior engineers working on their projects. The Defense Ministry was a large stone building lined with ship garages, and a guard stood with crossed arms in front of the entrance to prevent unauthorized entrance.

Carol hadn’t met this guard on any of her earlier escapades around Torfa, but she assumed he recognized the eight-pointed star that adorned her chest. Captain Marvel was a myth among younger generations of Torfan refugees ever since the destruction of the toxic vibranium mines. She walked up to the steps of the building with crossed arms and prepared to demand the guard allow her an audience with the Defense Minister.

She never got as far as ‘so kindly show me to the war room’. In a display of hostility remarkable similar to one once shown by Gil upon Carol’s first arrival on Torfa, the guard backhanded her across the courtyard hard enough that she flew backwards and crashed into the ground. Her nose started dripping blue Kree blood, a splash of blue sky against the pale sand. She held her hand to her nose and resisted the wave of nausea that always came with the sight of kree blood where human blood should have been. Carol pushed herself up and saw that golden strands of energy were already dripping off of her fists, even as she resisted the urge to use a photon blast.

The guard strode steadily forward, his hands clenched at his sides. Through the painful ringing that blurred her thoughts, Carol made out some of his words: “out of my town, kree  _ b-tch.” _

It wasn’t the first time people had made that mistake. The modified Kree battle suit was originally supposed to be a symbol of her taking what the Kree had given her and making it her own; the powers, the blood, the fighting skills, the suit. As time had gone on, it had instead become a point of confusion among those who still assumed the suit- despite it’s inverted color scheme- was just a symbol of status for kree soldiers. That issue had faded over time, as the symbol of Captain Marvel- the famed defector of the kree army, the defeated of armies, killer of thousands, savior of many- had become more recognizable than the star of Hala that adorned the suit’s chest. No one mistook the star for that of Hala; they were too busy either running in fear or asking for an autograph. Apparently, this fame wasn’t known to the new Defense Ministry guard. As Carol got to her feet, the man continued to bear down on her. He pulled an electrified nightstick from his belt and started waving it at her. Carol had to push away the instinct to just blast him in the face. As he stood over her- he was a full head taller, even with her boots- she cocked back one fist and, with a powerful movement, punched him backwards across the dirt. He slammed his head on the stone steps to the building and fell unconscious. 

_ Dammit, Danvers, watch where you punch before someone gets his head cracked open like that.  _ Carol hiked her way over to the man’s limp form and prompted a holographic display to pop up from her suit cuffs and scan for vitals.  _ All steady. _ He’d be fine, but people were starting to stare and point at the scene. One girl had started crying hysterically and screaming something about Kree invaders.

_ Good lord _ , Carol thought.  _ Anyone here heard of hospitality? _

But she understood the panic, all the same. This was a refugee camp, full of civilians and children displaced by war and terrorism, and as far as they were concerned she was a soldier from the same army that had destroyed their homes and livelihoods, and she’d come to finish the job.

It probably wasn’t the best move to make, but Carol hiked up the steps and pushed open the door to the Defense Ministry. As Carol made her way down rows of busy hallways and stairwells, she took a deep breath in and smelled the pervasive scent of smoke and engine oil that always adorned these corridors.

Jackie was exactly where Carol thought she’d be: the War Room. It was a small hall, always cluttered with catalogues of shipments and supply runs. Even the name was a bit of a misnomer, as it had been years since the room was used for anything but keeping track of the Torfan economy. 

Jackie was hunched over a chart at the end of the table, discussing something with Gil, who sat in a chair with his arms crossed and a disgruntled expression. Upon hearing the sound of Carol’s boots clicking against the floor, they both looked up in unison.

Carol must have been a sight for sore eyes- hair a mess, bruised cheek, blood dripping from her nose- but they didn’t care. Jackie let out a shriek worthy of a hyena and enveloped Carol in a hug, disregarding the stain of blood against her oil-smeared shirt. 

“Um,” Carol said, voice muffled by Jackie’s shoulder. “So, it’s great to see you.”

“You’ve grown!” Jackie cooed, measuring Carol’s height with a tentacle. “And- aww, honey, you’ve got a nosebleed, there’s blood everywhere. This place will do that to ya, I guess. You know half our new residents- species from a planet over, came in a month ago because of border disputes- can’t stop getting bloody noses. ‘apparently they’re allergic to all the poison in the air, yknow?” She shook her head in disapproval.

“I think I broke your guard,” Carol tried to tell Jackie, but Gil interrupted her with a rib-crushing hug. 

“Captain!” He boomed, as Carol gently detached herself from the embrace. “It’s good of you to come! We’re in a bit of a pickle here, I’m afraid to say. There’s been some trouble.”

“I broke your guard,” Carol repeated, grabbing a tissue from a nearby table and holding it to her nose. The flow of blood was already stemming, thanks to kree healing factors. “Just a little, he’ll be fine. I’m really sorry, but he kinda decked me on the way here, so I punched him into the stairway.”

Jackie was so surprised that one of her tentacles dropped the wrench it was holding onto Carol’s foot. Carol gave a quick thank-you prayer to armoured kree boots.

~~~

As it turned out, Irngi- the guard that had been so conveniently bested by the Defense Ministry steps- was an immigrant, a Thierdan refugee from Uxor-4 who’d started his job only a week ago. Thierdans had evolved in a vast and unchanging desert that came primarily in shades of brown and gray, so their sense of vision was entirely grayscale. Carol cursed the laziness of evolution, especially when Tic and her crew arrived to help out and one of the crewmates tried to roundhouse kick Carol across Tic’s ship. Carol’s ribs did not break as intended, but the man’s ankle did- a few too many years of combat had given Carol an instinctual reaction to being attacked that way, and it wasn’t the kind of reaction that paused to ask questions.

Jackie sat them down and explained the problem. It was simple. Fifty refugees, half of whom had immigrated after Carol had destroyed the Vibranium mines, who had showed no previous symptoms, all of whom were sick. All of whom were dying. The symptoms of this disease were instantly recognizable to anyone who’d lived in Torfa through the mining disaster of the Sentimault: Vibranium sickness.

To Carol, the whole disaster reeked of failure. Torfa had been one of the few missions she had been sure was an undivided success. A whole colony’s lives had been on the line, and for once Carol’s primary method of problem solving- punching whatever was causing the problem until it went away- had worked. But here she’d been called back to Torfa, because apparently her strategy hadn’t been as waterproof as it had seemed, and now Torfan civilians were paying the price.

The first place the Defense Ministry’s assemblage investigated was the ruin of the Sentimault’s vibranium mines. The area, once a fully functioning mine, was now a vast crater lined with sand that had hardened and melted into a dark substance not unlike obsidian. Whatever metal equipment had remained at the site during the explosion had melted when Carol had blown the place to hell. 

Carol flew out to the crater with Jackie and an expert in geological engineering named Kri’lan. Kri’lan was, according to Jackie, one of the only people on Torfa who had any kind of reputable education and thus had been dragged on the mission along in hopes that he’d help them to spot the kind of geological damage that came with illegal mining.

Jackie parked their cruisers on the vast expanse of sand that bordered the crater and swung herself out of the booth with an enthusiasm. Carol felt a little indignant that Jackie had the gall to be happy in this kind of weather; no one should be cheerful when the mere sand could give you blisters. Kri’lan and Jackie prepared to hike their way down to the crater, but Carol flew ahead. She halted at the cliff edging the cavern, staring at the scene of destruction. 

Carol remembered the feeling that had come with the destruction of that mine. So much of her life was spent holding back the hum of energy that flowed through her veins, so she always remembered the few occasions where she could unleash that energy, just for a moment. The explosion, to anyone watching, had only taken a second- the darkness of the Torfan sky, a sudden flash of gold fire, a halo of smoke on the horizon, and darkness- but to her, every millisecond was as vividly recalled as if it were happening right then. The energy had crept up her legs, her arms, her hair. A glow of light had rimmed her vision as her eyes lit up like firecrackers- and then there was the moment it all snapped, the moment she’d let that power sling outwards with enough force to annihilate anything living that dared to venture too close.

Carol was still lost in the memory when Jackie and Kri’lan caught up, seeming unperturbed by the stifling Torfan sun. Kri’lan gazed at the cavern, which was half a football field wide, and then gazed at Carol, who was at least five full heads shorter than him, and looked impressed.

“Let’s split,” Jackie said. “I’ll take the equipment-” she waved a radio like device around with one of her tentacles- “around to the edge to get a better view. You two sit tight and look for big holes in the rock, comprehendè?”

Carol did a mock salute, and as Jackie started to walk away, she sat at the edge of the cliff and dangled her legs over the side, peering down at the steep fall. Kri’lan sat down next to her, and Carol gave him a look of surprise.

“Would’ve thought you were more scared of heights, Illuminati.”

He smirked. “Ex-fighter pilot. I’m used to it.”

She resurmised her initial impression of him as a scrawny intellectual type. “You don’t really strike me as a fighter pilot kind of guy.”

He shrugged. “Got my education back on an old Urxor-2 town, until the next city over started bombing us. It was one of those small-scale scuffles between cities with a lot of firepower- we all were so angry, we didn’t look around us until the dust had settled and left nothing alive. That’s where I learned to fly. Thought I’d fight in the battle, but by the time I passed my test the cities were in ruins. That’s how I came to Torfa.”

“I’m sorry,” Carol said, knowing it wasn’t sufficient. 

“I am too,” he said. “Thought I’d found peace here, at first. And then people started getting sick. Kids born with radiation mutations. My friends were all dying. I was there, in the battle- when you went up against the Spartax. Signed on as a fighter pilot. I still remember the speech.  _ My name is Captain Marvel... I am an Earthling and a warrior. But today I stand as one with the settlers of Torfa, who claim this planet and its resources as they were freely given in the aftermath of the Behemoth disaster... They are a peaceful people, but I am a woman of war. If you move against them, you move against me. I am willing to die here today, for this cause. I have made my choice... Now you make yours. _ ” He grinned. “I memorized it. Hearing you give that speech was one of the best moments of my life. It’ll go down in the history books- once we’re, ah, rich enough to buy history books here, yknow.”

Carol had barely even remembered giving that speech until he’d recited it. Fight that many battles and the speeches start to blur together. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are the only things keeping me alive


End file.
